Download Making Miss India Miss World: Constructing Gender, Power, by Susan Dewey PDF

By Susan Dewey

ISBN-10: 0815631766

ISBN-13: 9780815631767

During the unforeseen lens of the 2003 attractiveness competition, Susan Dewey's Making pass over India leave out international examines what female good looks has come to intend in a rustic remodeled via contemporary political, financial, and cultural advancements.

for nearly part a century, the omit India pageant has been a widespread characteristic of Indian pop culture, influencing, through the years, the traditional commonplace for woman good looks. As India participates more and more in an international financial system, that normal is progressively being formed by way of forces past the country's borders. in the course of the unforeseen lens of the 2003 attractiveness festival, Susan Dewey's Making omit India pass over international examines what female good looks has come to intend in a rustic remodeled by way of contemporary political, fiscal, and cultural advancements.

Dewey deals readers an up-close view of the wonder festival via her dialogue of the contestants' excessive education application, a technique that comprises broad actual, emotional, and cultural ameliorations. protecting every thing from right desk etiquette to most popular pores and skin tone, the writer finds the exacting criteria set through competition officers and mirrored in Indian society. but she additionally acknowledges the empowerment those ladies are afforded via their prestige as good looks symbols in a tradition more and more formed through the visible impact of nationwide and overseas media.

Making omit India omit global constitutes an immense cultural critique and an enlightening tackle how macroeconomic swap impacts cultural identification on the person point.

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Extra resources for Making Miss India Miss World: Constructing Gender, Power, and the Nation in Postliberalization India

Sample text

While the occasional photograph revealed this conservative rural ideal, the vast majority showed applicants in their middle-class approximations of fashionable garments. The most notable of the nonprofessional images showed a seductive young woman in a white tube top reclining in a dark room surrounded by all the accoutrements of middle-class Indian life, including trophies from school competitions framed in a glass case, a cassette player, and thin synthetic curtains. Her expression was the most notable element of the photograph, as it was a studied imitation of the slightly lowered eyes and half-smile that she would have seen on the Miss India contestants in Femina magazine.

Once the contestants were comfortable with me, they often commented on how strange it was that I had never entered Miss America. I was mistaken for a contestant (usually of Parsi origin) several times by reporters throughout the course of the pageant, and when I informed them that I was a researcher and PhD candidate writing a book on Miss India, many of them were reluctant to believe me. Sadly, the perceived fact remains that beauty is not intelligent. I was both an active participant and an anthropologist in the 2003 pageant process, which resulted in a sometimes uncomfortable combination of roles.

This is very much in keeping with a neoliberal economic philosophy, in which all participants are ideally equal players in competition with one another. The 2003 pageant also drew on the decade of experience that preceded it, making it an excellent site from which to examine both how urban India has changed following economic liberalization and the ways in which certain neoliberal ideologies have become embedded in institutions not directly related to structural adjustment. The process of becoming Miss India begins every year in September, when Femina prints entry forms in both its magazine and in the pages of the Times of India, which is owned by the same company.

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Making Miss India Miss World: Constructing Gender, Power, and the Nation in Postliberalization India by Susan Dewey


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